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Psychological Independence

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What is psychological independence and how does it primarily manifest itself?

Is there any non-fiction reading you can recommend on this topic?

Does a psychologically independent person experience social anxiety?

How does a person like this act in a romantic relationship or friendship, in contrast with someone who is the opposite--"needy"?

Thanks very much

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I haven't thought of a clear definition yet, but what I had in mind was the way Roark acts when he is in the company of others. I know that independence, strictly speaking, is relying on the use of one's own mind and own conclusions. What I am more interested in is how this will manifest itself in a person's psychology. I am not familiar with the scientific term used in the field of psychology. Maybe if I am too unclear for anyone to answer my questions, I will think about what I mean and then reply to this thread in a couple of days.

Note that my interest stems primarily from the fact that I am utilizing cognitive behavioral therapy to improve my psychology to something that more clearly reflects my conscious convictions.

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I'd call it the psychology of the self-sufficient ego.

This might give you something to think about.

I wrote this sentence for myself a while back: "An assertive man is one who does not acknowledge/respect other people's boundaries." It never sounded right to me. It gave me no insight as to how I was to avoid acknowledging/respecting people's boundaries, or which boundaries I ought to consider valid and which not.

More recently, I reworded the sentence, read it to myself and thought "that's it!". I wrote: "An assertive man is one who does not invent other people's boundaries."

I think that a lot of what goes on in social interaction is unreal, except in the sense that God is real (draw a picture of someone's skull and draw a bearded man inside it: that's God). Rand wrote that Roark gives a person nothing in his exchanges with them - in other words, he won't make real what isn't real. He won't think something of you just because of the clothes you are wearing, for instance, or the posture you try to assume in the first given moment. Now that does not mean that none of these things betray anything about you - they might. It means he doesn't try to pre-anticipate what a person is like. If you were to abandon trying to add colour and meaning to everything you see in a person, reminding yourself "It isn't real unless I make it real", it allows you to pay more attention to what is actually, truly, there. This is why Roark, and the other characters like him, were so good at judging people and were able to reach the insights they did.

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If I understood you correctly, psychological independence is largely emotional independence. But it seems that you add a bit of intellectual independence to the picture.

This said, emotional independence, as all independence is based on intellectual or mental independence.

Now what does emotional independence specifically look like? First of all it means that your emotional life is not dependent on what other people think about what you do. What, then is it dependent on? It's dependent on your own judgement. Basically emotional independence means that you live your life on your own terms and don't back down just because someone doesn't like it. So 'social anxiety' is a sign of a lack of emotional independence. I think Roark is a good example of emotional independence and Keating is a perfect example of the opposite. Emotional independence is achieved by taking your own thoughts serious. And especially by taking them more serious than other people's thoughts.

There is an old Zen saying: Never put another head above your own.

I think that sums it up quite well.

You can support your therapy by putting any thought/belief that your emotional well-being depends on what other people think of you to question and to debate it in writing. Doing this regularly (Picking one or two beliefs and tearing them down with reason 15 minutes in the morning and in the evening should be sufficient) will diminish their effect on your thinking.

Your post suggests that you judge emotional dependence as irrational. So this exercise may help you live this.

I can recommend watching "The Shawnshank Redemption". I don't know if the book is as good. But movies also have a strong effect on your emotions.

Good Premises,

Felix.

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... what I had in mind was the way Roark acts when he is in the company of others. I know that independence, strictly speaking, is relying on the use of one's own mind and own conclusions.

So you are talking about the opposite of a "second-hander", i.e. a first-hander.

To be truly independent, you should also not allow others to parasitize you intellectually. That is, you should not tell them how to live their lives, even if they beg you to do so. (Oops! Am I being self-exclusionary -- defining myself as non-independent by giving you a definition of independent?)

I wrote this sentence for myself a while back: "An assertive man is one who does not acknowledge/respect other people's boundaries." It never sounded right to me. It gave me no insight as to how I was to avoid acknowledging/respecting people's boundaries, or which boundaries I ought to consider valid and which not.

More recently, I reworded the sentence, read it to myself and thought "that's it!". I wrote: "An assertive man is one who does not invent other people's boundaries."

This makes no sense to me. Could you clarify it?

It sounds like you are saying that you should not respect other persons' rights. But I am sure that you would not mean that.

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It sounds like you are saying that you should not respect other persons' rights. But I am sure that you would not mean that.

It's nothing to do with rights. It's to do with submission and how we unconsciously surrender to imagined pressures. For instance, most people can't hold eye contact with a stranger. It is so powerful it feels like some force is pushing their gaze away. If you ask them why they will say they don't know, or might come up with some lame rationalisation, e.g. that it shows that you are aggressive. But I can hold eye contact with anyone indefinitely, and it just means that I'm confident in myself enough to not be self-consciously monitoring myself, and can permit myself to study the other person instead.

Of course, you won't know what I'm talking about if you've never experienced it - perhaps you've always had high self-esteem as long as you can remember. :lol:

I could explain further but I think this is something each person has to explore with his own mind, since everyone has their own unique forms of experiencing the kind of pressure I'm refering to. And I consider it on-topic because it is something most people experience but a psychologically consistent egotistical person certainly does not experience.

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Just wanted add this... since independence means a primary focus on one's own evaluations rather than the evaluations of others, it implies: a primary focus on reality and of one's honest evaluations of reality. So, to be independent is to proceed neither by the incorrect evaluations of others, nor by one's own arbitrary evaluations.

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It's nothing to do with rights. It's to do with submission and how we unconsciously surrender to imagined pressures. For instance, most people can't hold eye contact with a stranger. It is so powerful it feels like some force is pushing their gaze away. If you ask them why they will say they don't know, or might come up with some lame rationalisation, e.g. that it shows that you are aggressive. But I can hold eye contact with anyone indefinitely, and it just means that I'm confident in myself enough to not be self-consciously monitoring myself, and can permit myself to study the other person instead.

Couldn't that be a privacy issue, as well? Most of the time, I don't like to look into people's eyes for long. But often, it's because I don't like what I see in their eyes. I don't want to communicate what I'm seeing through my eyes. Sometimes it's because I do like what I see, and I don't want to communicate that either.

But maybe I'm just antisocial. To be honest, there are times when I'd like to cross someone's boundaries and get to know them on a more personal level, and find myself unsure about the most appropriate way to do so. Do I unconsciously surrender to imagined pressures? I'm not sure what that means.

Sustaining eye contact with a stranger could be a sign of aggression, in a certain context. I'm sure sometimes you might be right that a person can be afraid to make eye contact because they have low self esteem, and think that healthy displays of assertiveness or extroversion are innapropriate for someone "like them." But here's another possibility-- what if they really do feel agressive towards strangers, and don't want to reveal that and thus initiate senseless confrontations? In various situations, that could be either a symptom of low self-esteem, or perfectly warrented behavior, when surrounded by people who should inspire agression.

Ex-bannana eater, I agree with what the other posters have said, but you might also like to look into what psychologists refer to as "internal locus of control" vs "external locus of control." That's a lot like psychological independence vs dependence, from a slightly different perspective than simply intellectual independence (it delves into the emotional and physiological aspects too). I'm not an expert in psychology, and different psychologist's views on the issue differ according to their respective premises, of course-- but a few internet searches in the right places should bring up some interesting material at the least.

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Couldn't that be a privacy issue, as well? Most of the time, I don't like to look into people's eyes for long. But often, it's because I don't like what I see in their eyes. I don't want to communicate what I'm seeing through my eyes. Sometimes it's because I do like what I see, and I don't want to communicate that either.

The volition is in the concealment, not the communication. The communication is subconscious. Why put effort into concealing it? Is your motive justifiable? I think any attempt to restrain your subconscious in front of an audience is apologising for who you are, and by doing that you undermine yourself.

To be honest, there are times when I'd like to cross someone's boundaries and get to know them on a more personal level, and find myself unsure about the most appropriate way to do so. Do I unconsciously surrender to imagined pressures? I'm not sure what that means.
There is no method. All awkwardness between human beings is in thinking there is a way to communicate. The only way is your way. If you don't know what to say, it's because you don't know what you want to say. Which is because you don't know (or are supressing) what you want. The solution is to stay closer to your ego. You can feel how far from your ego a certain action was. I like to imagine a moon orbiting around a planet, where the planet is my ego and the moon is my will. Ideally they should be together, so I ask myself, how far from the ego do I swing? And then I can measure that against any action I perform. Subverting yourself to others' will draw you out of orbit.

You must know your intent. Communication is an approximate science. I say approximate in that in the realm of voice intonation, body language etc. a lot of meaning is just the meaning people grant to these subtleties. Don't make the mistake of substituting what people think something means, for what you actually intended by it. Know what you intend by any given thing and don't forget it - worship it! Then the best (egocentric) communication will follow easily.

Sustaining eye contact with a stranger could be a sign of aggression, in a certain context.

It's never a sign of aggression (by itself). It reveals a certain state of mind, where you are in control. You are in control because your thought does not break. If you lock eyes on a stranger, what you think determines how long you can hold their gaze. When someone is looking at you, they are measuring you. You can either try to blank that out (which requires that you avert your gaze), or instead focus on measuring them. Eventually this will be automatized and you won't even realise you're doing it.

When you look away it says, summed up in an overall feeling: "I don't know what I'm doing - or what is going on - he's looking at me - he looks sure of himself - I'll lower my eyes." You irrationally esteem the other person by doing this.

When you don't look away it says: Nothing. You are just yourself.

Eye contact is an infallable litmus test for determining confidence, in my opinion. Because you can't fake it. How long you can hold someone's gaze, is just that.

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what I had in mind was the way Roark acts when he is in the company of others.

How would you describe the way Roark acts in the company of others?

What I am more interested in is how this will manifest itself in a person's psychology.

This may be a question based on subjective inference, but are you interested in how independence effects a person's way of socializing? (or how an independent person socializes?)

It's never a sign of aggression (by itself). It reveals a certain state of mind, where you are in control. You are in control because your thought does not break. If you lock eyes on a stranger, what you think determines how long you can hold their gaze. When someone is looking at you, they are measuring you. You can either try to blank that out (which requires that you avert your gaze), or instead focus on measuring them. Eventually this will be automatized and you won't even realise you're doing it.

Is the sustainment of eye contact a sign of anything by itself? And how does it reveal a certain state of mind? In other words, how do you come to find that out?

And how does what one think determine how long one will hold someone else's gaze? I can hold someone else's gaze while my mind is absent of thought. (or when you said 'think,' were you also using this concept to subsume the absence of thought?)

And what about the assertion that a man is measuring you simply by looking at you? What did you mean by "look" in this instance?

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It seems arbitrary to claim that maintaining eye contact can never be a sign of aggression, but looking away is always a sign of weakness. For one thing, looking at something requires a certain amount of concentration on that thing. Sometimes, for me, to concentrate on something else, for instance, what the person is saying to me, or some other value judgement, involuntarily leads to me looking away-- not submisively, but pensively. Again, I'm not saying that looking away can't be a sign of weakness and submission, just that it's not necissarily that.

If, as you seem to maintain, communication is entirely subjective ("the only way is your way"), doesn't that undermine your premise that "eye contact is an infallable litmus test for determining confidence"? Couldn't it be something else for me? Couldn't it be, for some people, a sign of agression?

It's never a sign of aggression (by itself). It reveals a certain state of mind, where you are in control. You are in control because your thought does not break...

When you look away it says, summed up in an overall feeling: "I don't know what I'm doing - or what is going on - he's looking at me - he looks sure of himself - I'll lower my eyes." You irrationally esteem the other person by doing this.

When you don't look away it says: Nothing. You are just yourself.

Eye contact is an infallable litmus test for determining confidence, in my opinion. Because you can't fake it. How long you can hold someone's gaze, is just that.

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I will reply with answers to some of the questions you posed to me soon. I have been rather busy, and haven't even been able to continue my self-cognitive therapy at the moment. Thanks for all of your responses.

The eye contact thing reminds me of what I've read PUA's (pick-up artists) tend to use to create a sense of chemistry with a person initially. I've noticed that sometimes just the initial looking in a woman's eyes is very spiritual.

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